INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - MARTIN DENNY, EXOTICA

As a child of the 1960s, I was privy to sampling the golden age of easy listening music, courtesy of my parent's record collection. My mom was the primary collector in the house, but my dad had his favorites too and while mom favored the likes of Elvis and Johnny Cash, my dad was more drawn to the exotica realm, sometimes with Polynesian influences, but more often with Latin & Mexican flair. Though this music was well represented in our home, I don't recall any Martin Denny albums on the shelf.

It wasn't until 1984 that I was finally turned on to Denny and his "Exotica" albums. This happened squarely because of my interest in Industrial music, principally that of Throbbing Gristle. TG had been proponents of the work of Denny for some time, playing his music after their live shows and dedicating albums to him as well as doing stunningly convincing parodies of his infamous LP covers. This was a long time before the 1990s revival of the whole genre of "bachelor pad, space-age, exotic & easy listening" music.

Back then, collecting Denny recordings was only doable when you could find them in second hand bins in record shops and thrift stores. Mostly they were in pretty rough shape, so you'd be lucky to find one that wasn't beat up too badly. At first, putting them on was a bit of hipster irony to some extent, but we soon dropped the pretense when we noticed how much we were legitimately enjoying this music. There was real innovation going on here and it turned out Genesis was right about there being a kinship in Denny's approach to arrangements with that being pursued by the modern experimental musicians. You could definitely hear the attention to detail in the creation of "ambiance" between the two. Using odd vocal effects was just an early precursor to some of the more extreme sounds eventually used to create atmosphere in the contemporary arena.

This music remained something of a cult among the underground for several years until RE/Search publications started putting out their Incredibly Strange Music volumes in the early 1990s. The two books in this series became touchstones as they ventured into the record collections of the artists who were influenced by music on the fringes. The books were directly inspired by the alternative music underground's obsession with the strange. The dissemination of this information then kicked off a massive revival of retro music throughout the remainder of the decade. By the mid 1990s, there were special club nights and nightclubs entirely dedicated to the old "swing" music or exotica or space-age pop. People were dressing up in retro clothes and record companies were reissuing everything they could dig up from their vaults on CD, usually wonderfully remastered from the original tapes.

While the mainstream has moved on from its nostalgia fads of that decade, enough of a support base has remained that we continue to have access to this music in the modern forms of streaming media and digital distribution. The music has returned to its cult status, somewhat, but at least it still survives in our modern media landscape for new generations to discover its charms.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - BOYD RICE

It was some time in 1985 when I first had a chance to flip through a copy of RE/Search's groundbreaking book, The Industrial Culture Handbook.  I was very much a TG fan, so the lead chapter on them drew me immediately to the book, but it also introduced me to some other names I had yet to encounter.  One of the most intriguing and enigmatic personalities showcased in this publication was an American by the name of Boyd Rice.  His approach and techniques seemed to be entirely outside the realm of any sort of standard music making I'd ever encountered.  Whereas TG had still engaged with recognizable "instruments" (guitar, bass, cornet, keyboards), Rice, within the context of his NON project, was generating sounds in ways which seemed completely alien.  He was using machines or broken records or, if he did use a guitar, he'd have an electric fan mounted to it to thrash the strings mechanically.  His whole aesthetic seemed to be coming from someplace entirely different than any traditional musician I'd encountered, no matter how "avant-garde" they may have appeared. 

The first album by Boyd that I came across was his 1977 debut, simply titled, Boyd Rice, but often referred to as "The Black Album".  Encased in a plain black sleeve with only the name, Boyd Rice, embossed on the front, it had no song titles or credits save for the record label which advised the LP was "playable at any speed" and that it was recorded between 1975-1976.  Years before Spinal Tap, this record really seemed like there was "none more black".  Based on the article/interview in RE/Search, I was braced for something entirely unlistenable.  In fact, I must confess my motivation for buying the album was rather as a novelty, something to put on to shock people or piss them off.  What I wasn't expecting was how enjoyable the record would turn out to be!   It wasn't all blaring, jarring noise at all.  Sure, there were some sections which were more intense than others, but there were movements which were quite soft and dreamy sounding.  The extreme use of repetition and looping was the biggest takeaway for me in that it demonstrated the effects of such techniques as a viable compositional tactic.  It also opened me up to the idea that sound sources could come from virtually anyplace and be used for making music. 

In the years since I first listened to his records, Boyd has released a wide variety of music, even a cover album of pop standards from the 1960s (Spell) and he's become a controversial figure for his views and associations.  I tend to take it all with a grain of salt, and find myself occasionally having to qualify my opinion, but the influence and impact of his work over the years cannot be discounted or dismissed.